Montana State University

Diversity Awareness Office

Why So Slow? A Campus Conversation About Gender in the Academy

Dr. Virginia Valian,

 

Dr. Virginia Valian,
Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology
Hunter College

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We have the first female president at MSU. Our new Provost is a woman. Do we still need to be talking about gender? Hasn’t the glass ceiling been broken? Sure thing. But look around the campus and you will still see that fewer than half the students are women, fewer than a third of the tenure track faculty are women -  and in some areas - there are zero women. In contrast, women make up nearly 60% of both adjunct instructors and MSU staff. The majority of students and faculty in the College of Nursing are overwhelmingly women. Is this a “gender issue?” You bet.

Please join the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the College of Letters and Science and the Office of Affirmative Action in welcoming Dr. Valian to lead some engaging discussions on gender in the academy. Click here for more information and a schedule of her visit.

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Dr. Virginia Valian is a distinguished Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and co-director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project. Her research asks why so few women are at the top of their profession, whether the profession be science, law, medicine, college teaching, industry, or business. A strong interest in sex differences led her to write Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (MIT Press, 1998; paperback, 1999). Her research current research in the Language Acquisition Research Center (LARC) investigates knowledge and use of language in young monolingual English speakers (two- and three-year-olds), bilingual children (four- to eight-year-olds), and second language learners (four- to eight-year-olds and adults).

For more information about Dr. Valian's on-going projects, please visit www.hunter.cuny.edu/littlelinguist/projects.html.

For information about her book, please click here. There will be books for sale after the public talk, provided by the MSU bookstore.

Photo credited to: Frank Fournier