Gender equity Q and A

Virginia Valian, author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, offered the following answers to questions from CLAS:

Would you describe the most common “gender schemas” for men and for women?

The gender schema for men:  capable of independent action, getting down to the business at hand, doing things for a reason.

The gender schema for women:  nurturant, communal, and expressive of feelings.

If you think about your schema for a natural scientist, or the head of a company, it probably meshes better with the schema for men than the schema for women.

How powerful are they – is simple awareness of them enough to overcome their influence?

Gender schemas are extremely powerful.  Awareness of them is a help but is by no means enough.  They influence our perceptions and our evaluations before we know it.

One example I give about myself:  a colleague asked me to give a guest lecture to the incoming graduate class of students in developmental psychology.  He told me that it was an interesting group, including a former Protestant minister and a retired nurse.  As the class trickled in I kept waiting for the Protestant minister to show up, but everyone coming in was a woman.  When my colleague said, "I think we're all here now," I wondered if the Protestant minister had dropped the program.  Not until I was into my second slide did I realize that one of the women present was the Protestant minister.

When do these schemas kick in – do we acquire them very early in life?

Gender schemas operate at least as early as age 3.  They do operate in elementary and secondary education, in subtle ways:  what do we expect of girls and boys?; how hard do we challenge girls and boys, especially at male-dominated activities?; what vision do we have of their futures?  It's not visible in children's grades.  Indeed, girls get better grades on the whole.  It plays itself out more in what kind of future is imagined for girls and boys.

What is it going to take to change things? Is it just going to be slower, to use a word from your title, or is it not going to happen without institutional change?

We need institutional change.  Many efforts in the past have been aimed at changing women, or at least informing women.  And it's important for women to understand how things work and to receive valuable information.  They are less likely than men to receive that information.  But we also need to change how our institutions work.  For example, when we see a colloquium series in chemistry that only has male speakers, we need to specifically ask ourselves whether there are qualified female speakers whom we are unintentionally overlooking?

Do women’s gender schemas operate in their evaluation and treatment of other women?

In almost every experiment where subtle judgments are being measured, there are no differences in how men and women rate other men and women.  But women are probably more receptive to the theory explaining how evaluations short-change women than men are.  Knowledgeable women may thus make more of an effort to evaluate people accurately; for example, they can ask themselves how they would evaluate a person if that person were the other sex.

In an interview, you pointed to one solution: “Leaders can share authority and legitimize authority in others, including women.”  But isn’t that what happens now – the “old boy network” that disadvantages women, or only accepts a limited number of women into the club?

Yes, the only difference here would be to deliberately enlarge the range of the people who are legitimated.  We can't avoid the power of leaders but we can try to put that power to better use.

Have you seen much change since your book was published?

There has been change, but the title of my book is still appropriate.  Women's advancement is still too slow.

Is the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College still going on? How did it change Hunter?

The GEP continues.  It was founded when Hunter received an ADVANCE Institutional Transformation award of $3.75 million from the National Science Foundation.  The GEP has had multiple effects, of which I can mention a few: the productivity of women natural and social scientists has improved, benchmarks of women's and men's progress are monitored annually, attrition of women has decreased, women's leadership has increased.

You mentioned in your tutorials that women drop out of science more often than other areas – why?

I'd like to put women's attrition from science and engineering in perspective:  men also leave science more than they leave other areas.  In recent NSF data, 60 percent of engineering degrees went to individuals who were not native-born Americans.  We're clearly doing something wrong!  The other important perspective is that even when women are well-represented, as they are in my field of psychology, they don't advance at the same rate as men.

You have chosen to concentrate on data and experiments more than anecdotes. What was your reason for this?

I'm a scientist!