Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women

Why So Slow? The

Advancement of Women

Virginia Valian. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998, 401 pp., $30.00

VIRGINIA VALIAN, WHILE DRAWING on concepts and data from such disparate disciplines as economics, biology, and sociology, relies heavily on socialpsychological and psychological research to provide a comprehensive resource for dealing with one of the more disturbing and persistent problems of the latter half of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that most professional men and women believe in equality between the sexes, few women occupy positions of power and prestige. Despite a vigorous women's movement and significant legal and political changes, we are left with a nagging question: why does the advancement of women proceed so slowly? Valian comes down clearly on the side of social-psychological and cultural factors in answering this question. Her thesis is that only by understanding how our perceptions are skewed by "gender schema" can we begin to perceive ourselves and others more accurately, and therefore remedy gender inequalities.

For Valian, gender schema refer to a set of implicit, or unconscious, hypotheses about sex differences that shape men's and women's professional lives. These gender schema "affect our expectations of men and women, our evaluations of their work, and their performance as professionals." The most important consequence of such schema, she argues, is that men are consistently "overrated" while women are "underrated." Since these schema are generally unarticulated, and since we are not fully in control of the operation of such unconscious schema, Valian sets out to make them visible.

While this is an important task, it gives short shrift to the power dynamics and socio-historical conditions that give rise to and maintain gender schema. Moreover, Valian somewhat misses the mark in believing that as a scientist using quantitative data she will put to rest doubts about the legitimacy of her arguments because she does not rely on anecdotes, which seems to be shorthand for qualitative data. One of the important contributions of contemporary feminist inquiry and scholarship has been its trenchant critique of the assumption that quantitative data are superior to qualitative data and of the seeming neutrality of scientific research. Equally troubling, as Valian admits early on, is that the data she uses focus on a specific population: those who are young, white, middle class, heterosexual, and American. Related to this last point, and implicit in psychological postulates, is the assumption that there is a stable and uniform understanding of gender across ethnic, class, and race categories and throughout life.

Scientific data are not, on their own, an incontestable argument for the formation of gender schema, and our ways of perceiving and thinking about gender are not the only factors in maintaining gender disadvantages for women. Valian rarely probes either the economic or the political issues at the heart of the power differentials between men and women, or the politics associated with creating knowledge in academia. Her remedies for improving the status of women in the public sphere are therefore left primarily to the individual. Women should be friendly and respectful, build power, seek information, become experts, negotiate, bargain, seek advancement, overcome internal barriers to effectiveness, and so on. While these can be important strategies for change, much more is needed. Valian believes that institutional change will proceed from changes in gender schema, but what is missing is an analysis of the inextricable links between the institutional status quo and the power dynamics involved in the cultural constructions of gender.

Valian is at her best when she highlights, through the skillful use of AAUP data, the persistent discrimination against women in academe. Unlike other sections of her book where she relies heavily on individual power brokering to explain the slow advancement of women, here she looks to institutional dynamics to understand differences between men and women. Valian shows that women, when compared with men, are promoted and granted tenure more slowly, work at less prestigious institutions, and earn less money. Although the data appear to suggest that female and male assistant professors are similar in various ways, Valian argues that "since women hold lower positions longer than men do, the salary figures at the ranks of assistant and associate levels are misleadingly positive and underrepresent the gender disparity." These findings hold true across the disciplines. Female graduates begin on an equal "salary footing" with men, but Valian notes that the salary disparities increase with years in the profession. To portray the disparities in rank and tenure between men and women, Valian recalculated the aggregate data provided by the AAUP in order to prevent the skewing of the data by the presence of a large percentage of older male full professors. Across all fields, ages, and institutions, women continue to be overrepresented at the bottom ranks. Figures for 1995-96 show that 72 percent of men were tenured, but only 48 percent of women were. Valian convincingly argues that universities are not hiring and promoting women in the same way that they are men, that since 1976 there has been no progress in closing the gender gap between men and women, and that since 1980 there has been a "consistent gender gap of 28 percentage points at universities and 22 percentage points at four-year colleges."